The ambassador program deputizes community members to take a more formal role in championing IIIF adoption in their communities. Ambassadors focus their efforts around different domains, associations, tools, or regions and meet with IIIF-C staff periodically to provide updates and feedback.
The program is currently in trial, with our first group appointed by invite from the Outreach group and IIIF-C staff. Following a successful trial period, those interested in becoming an Ambassador may apply during an annual call.
Current ambassadors:
Roger Hyam, Biodiversity Data Systems Developer, Royal Botanical Garden Edinburgh, Scotland
IIIF for natural history
Roger trained as a botanist, completing a PhD in the molecular systematics of the genus Rhododendron in the 1990s, but became increasingly involved in data science and software. He crossed to the commercial software development world for a few years in the early 2000s before returning to the hybrid field of biodiversity informatics and working for the standards organisation TDWG. He is now on staff at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh where he continues his interest in the mechanics of sharing biodiversity data between organisations. Currently he is working on an EU funded project to encourage adoption of IIIF by natural history collections.
Régis Robineau
IIIF adoption in France
Régis is the technical coordinator of Biblissima, a French project which federates a set of digital resources on ancient written cultures. After two Master’s degrees in History and Library and Information Science, he worked as a developer in a private web agency and as an engineer for various digital research projects in the Humanities. He is part of the Biblissima team of engineers since 2013 and involved in the IIIF community since its early days. He is also a driving force of the IIIF360 initiative, an expertise and support service around IIIF standards in France.
Andrija Sagic, Head of Digitization Department, Library Milutin Bojic, Belgrade, Serbia
IIIF adoption in Serbia
Andrija is Coordinator of the Digital Transformation of Libraries Section for the Serbian Library Association, which helps libraries in the digitization process. He is also an Associate member of IFLA’s Audiovisual and Multimedia Section. Andrija has implemented the first IIIF-supported digital repository in Serbia and has helped in implementations for two other repositories.
Joe Song, IntelliJourney, Shanghai, China
IIIF adoption in China
Joe is a Digital Humanities enthusiast, independent software vendor, and Fudan University alumnus. Inspired by the vision of IIIF, he aims to introduce Chinese ancient scripts, paintings, and calligraphies to the whole world. As a nation that is proud of its continuous culture of 5000 years, China has a huge amount of cultural heritage waiting to be transformed into an interoperable form. With that goal in mind, Joe is especially interested in implementing IIIF in large scale scenarios, such as writing a cloud-native image server or enabling editing millions of images and publishing them in one click. Joe hopes more and more universities, colleges, and institutions in China will become part of the IIIF family and enjoy the fruits of unprecedented academic freedom.
Frederick Zarndt, Coronado, CA
International IIIF awareness
Frederick has been a member of the IFLA Governing Board as well as Chair of its Division II and former secretary and chair of the IFLA News Media Section. For 8 years, he was the administrative chair of the ALTO XML Editorial Board. Frederick has 25+ years experience in software development and is a member of ACM and IEEE and a Certified Software Development Professional (CSDP). He is a member of ALA and IFLA. Frederick has Master’s Degrees in Computer Science and Physics.